


a different kind of light

by essektheylyss (midnightindigo)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Cleric Essek Au, Complicated Relationships with Religion, Fictional Religion & Theology, Gen, I get to choose when elves sleep and dream in fic and there is zero consistency, Major Character Injury, Redemption, Religious Conflict, Temporary Character Death, because I have a brand, literally so much theological musing, some domestic intimacy that could be shippy if you've got your goggles on, the character death is post-revivify but the death itself is not shown, this isn't about logical consistency this is about theology and redemption and nothing else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26015845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightindigo/pseuds/essektheylyss
Summary: Sometimes, when a desperate plea reaches the ears of the gods, one of them answers. Essek has spent his life crafting his hands into weapons, and he wonders whether they will ever be fit to heal.
Relationships: The Mighty Nein & Essek Thelyss
Comments: 24
Kudos: 158





	a different kind of light

**Author's Note:**

> I've been saying for months I was gonna write this fic and I finally finished it, so, you know, enjoy!

It’s a bad enough fight that Caduceus has to revive two of them, Jester and Caleb, and all he can do is stand and watch as both of them sputter back to life, fingers clawing at hewn skin for breath. Veth cradles Caleb’s broken skull, a mass of blood over one side of his face even after the injuries beneath it have been healed, and Fjord rocks Jester in his lap as she sobs into his chest, Beau gripping her hand, a shimmering outline of a green cloak hovering nearby with a nervous energy. He sees the archfey drop to kiss her head, and disappears with a whisper that takes his anxiety with him, leaving only the fears of the group around them, and all Essek can feel is numb.

He erects the hut that night, familiar enough with Caleb’s shorthand to use his spellbook, and lets the other wizard rest, curled among his family and asleep even before the dome shimmers into being. He offers to take first watch before he needs to rest, letting the clerics recover spells now that he’s seen firsthand how valuable that divine energy can be. 

It is too dark and silent and still as he sits, crosslegged and straight-backed, tense in the knowledge that he is now the only thing between this family that he wants desperately to think of his and whatever else might seek to bring them to ruin. 

Essek can create a blackened field of energy that crushes his enemies into dust. But he cannot heal. 

It is this that he thinks about, as he stares at the dark lines of his hands, the same shade of indigo grey as dunamis, and knows then that he can never believe in the luxon as a god. It is the belief itself that allows its priests to work miracles, to bring people back from the dead, but the beacons themselves… he thinks they must be as dead as he feels right now, simply a vessel for other dead things before they can be recycled into something else.

Of course, that does not mean he harbors any scorn for the gods.

He thinks, as the hours go by, of the way Caduceus talks about nature, how Jester describes chaos and balance, how Fjord tells the story of being saved by the Wildmother, how comfortable Yasha is in a storm. 

He thinks that no god would allow a follower of theirs to harbor such uncertainty as his—but then, perhaps he was never a follower of the luxon, and as such was never afforded such faith. Still, it is a cruel god to stay so silent in the face of questioning, and no matter the nature of the luxon—if it clearly does not believe in him, how can he believe in it?

But by the light, he so desperately wishes that his hands knew how to heal. All they know now is destruction—of his enemies, of this continent, of his friends’ trust in him. 

It is the last one that’s broken him, and he wonders whether he can ever recover that trust completely if all he knows how to create is hurt.

His eyes land on Jester, nose still pink from crying, huddled between Beau and Yasha as she sleeps fitfully. Then to Caleb, who is tucked in the middle of the group, fingers gripping Veth’s arms tightly and back to back with Fjord. The person who made him realize perhaps he had a reason to change, and the one who gave him the opportunity to do so. 

Both of them had been gone, for a minute, and both of them would’ve stayed that way had Caduceus not been there. His mind strays to the possibility of both Jester and Caduceus falling in battle, and he shudders violently enough that he has to block out the thought. 

“ _Gods help me,_ ” he murmurs, and turns his eyes toward the sky. “ _Please._ ”

— 

And they do.

Of course, there is bickering first. The gods are many and varied, and such a broad plea to the heavens always inspires such a debate. Corellon makes a compelling argument, as the patron of the arcane and elves, but Sehanine reminds them of the drow affinity to the night. Kord puts Ioun forward, as the patron of knowledge, but she waves the notion away, pushing the plea to Avandra, with her focus of freedom and change.

It is the Everlight, however, who steps forward, quietly, firmly, and says that this child (because for the gods, even the elves with their longevity are children—it is a kinder epithet than insects) belongs to her, that his soul falls firmly in her domain. She has long been silent among the others that they fall quiet at her arrival. Ioun nods, satisfied, and the rest of the gods bow their heads to allow her to claim him.

— 

In the midst of combat, he turns to see Beau, cornered between two giants, weaving injury into their skin with her staff and glowing fists. But two blows to the head have her moments away from falling, and he cries out, his voice carrying across the battlefield, shrill as it is. “ _Beau!_ ”

He can see it glow in the air with an energy he has never possessed, and it hits Beau’s chest, instilling her with enough energy to raise her staff to block the next blow, barrel rolling between the giant’s legs and coming up beside him, breathless and bloodied but not beaten.

“What the hell was that?” she spares a moment to ask, eyes wide. He only shakes his head, dumbfounded, as the giants turn on both of them, and he starts to weave runes that he does know into the air to pull them into a force field of darkness.

“I have no idea,” he says, as the darkness consumes them.

— 

Essek never dreams, except when he does. 

He knows well enough that he is sitting crosslegged in the dome, legs stiff and sore on the packed dirt on which they’ve made camp tonight. He knows that Caduceus is on watch, calmly making tea. He knows that the sky is obscured by fog. 

And yet…

He is in a bowl of a place, where the night sky is alight with constellations he doesn’t have names for, and the ground beneath his feet glitters before it reaches the edge of an infinite sea. A brazier rests on the ground to his left, and he follows the soft light of glowing coals to the woman who stands on its other side, a smile soft on her brown face, braids of hair the same color as her ivory wings. 

He has done enough reading to know a god when he sees one.

He sinks to one knee the moment he lays eyes on her, and averts his gaze from hers. He has not done enough reading to know how much deference he should pay, so he does what he can in order to not be smote right here and now. 

“Normally, we don’t have night here,” her soft voice says, and he keeps his head bowed. “But I thought you might be more comfortable in the dark.”

The time he has spent traveling away from his home, time spent in the sun, have not been particularly pleasant for him, even with what cover he has created for himself. He’s been working on crafting a spell that will make the sun treat him better, but so far he has been unsuccessful. 

He still has no idea whether he is allowed to speak, so he stays quiet. 

“You’ve come a long way since your transgressions,” she continues, and his heart races. As much as he recognizes her as a god, he does not know what intent she has with him. “You could be a beacon to others like you, if you chose to do so.”

It is hard to obscure the wince he makes involuntarily at that, and he watches her feet as they move around the glowing brazier to stand in front of him.

“Do you not believe yourself worthy of atonement?” she asks, and within his field of view, she offers a hand. Her fingers glow from what he thinks is the fire, but it takes a moment to realize that they should be in shadow. “You are working to do better, even when that work puts you in danger—when you would be safer in your selfishness. That alone makes you worthy.”

He gives half a smile, though he’s not sure she sees it. “My apologies,” he speaks finally, and shakes his head, expecting some kind of retribution. “Your use of the word beacon… it was simply ironic.”

“Redemption often pairs well with a bit of irony,” she says. Her palm is still held out to him. “Will you take what I offer you?”

“I don’t even know who you are.”

“Then perhaps it is a leap of faith,” she says, and he can hear the smile in her voice.

Irony it is, then.

He takes her hand, and she helps him to his feet.

“You have a ways to go, child,” she says, and he can’t quite bring himself to meet her eyes. “But you are on the right path to reach what you seek. Will you carry my light with you?”

It’s hard not to give that same rueful smile. It is hard to settle on a feeling, here, where he feels as though he’s caught in a dream—not a nightmare, just something that will be a fleeting memory come morning. He’s found that giving oneself to a dream becomes all-consuming. It’s how you start to forget how to tell right from wrong. 

He knows that well enough.

“As you have mentioned, light and I don’t get along very well. In… more ways than one.”  
“Mine is a different kind of light.”

“What is the nature of the luxon?” he asks, and dares to glance at her face. She doesn’t seem surprised by the question, only amused. 

“Perhaps Ioun should’ve claimed you, with the curiosity in your soul,” she says, and her hand is warm when it cups his cheek. “That isn’t an answer I have for you, dear one.”

It’s the answer he’d expected, but he is grateful to know that he is speaking with an honest god. “I…” This was not a choice he would have seen himself making, a year ago, a century ago. “I will carry your light.”

Her smile widens, and all he can feel is the pure bliss of her joy. She points toward the inland horizon, and he follows her gaze, seeing the sky begin to lighten over the island on which they stand. Trees and rock formations obscure the landscape, but towering over it, backlit by the expanding light that seems to come from nothing, an angelic figure with a heart of fire that comes to a spiraling point rises. 

“One day, I will bring you home,” she says, and squeezes his hand that is still in hers. “For now, wake, and learn. The Everlight will be with you.”

And as the sky lightens to a brilliant blue, the light doesn’t hurt his eyes, and he wakes in the dawn among his friends.

The light on the Prime Material plane, with the sun not yet risen, is softer in his gaze now.

He is lying on the ground, and he wonders if, for the first time in his life, he has learned what sleep is. He pushes himself up, finding that for the first time in weeks, the ground they sleep on has not left him sore. In fact, he can’t remember the last time he woke for the day feeling as rested as he does now. 

A blanket slides off of him, and he looks up to see Caduceus sitting turned from him and watching the dawn. “I was meant to take last watch,” he says sheepishly, as he shuffles over to sit beside Caduceus, but his friend only shakes his head.

“The Wildmother sustained me—she was under the impression that it was wise to let you sleep. I felt a presence. A light.”

The gods are now conspiring for his soul, it would seem. In the past, he might’ve scoffed at the idea. Now… it’s comforting to know that someone else is interested in his salvation. “Yes,” he says as he takes his seat and joins Caduceus to watch the sunrise. Caduceus pulls some of the lichen from the shoulder of his armor and holds it out. It glows faintly, a pale, luminescent pink.

“I think you may be able to use this.”

Essek takes it, turning it over in his hand, and with an instinct from somewhere beyond his consciousness, he whispers a few words in undercommon and smashes the moss between his fingers.

His hand glows, like the Everlight’s hand glowed when she offered it to him.

He stares at it as Caduceus pats him on the shoulder. “Congratulations, that’s… that’s really good.”

And he pushes himself to his feet to begin to cook breakfast, while the sun echoes the light in Essek’s palm, and he thinks he has never known warmth like this.

— 

It takes him quite a while to tell the others—even with so much divine energy around them, it is hard to say it out loud to them. Perhaps it has to do with how little he feels he deserves the favor of a god, how little he thinks he has done to earn it, but Sarenrae’s words are burned like light in his eyes: _You are working to do better. That alone makes you worthy._

Perhaps he simply wonders how some of them will take it. 

When a light flares in battle, throwing an arrow meant for him off course, Caleb stares at him, but it is quickly forgotten in the chaos of combat as they are pulled apart yet again. He marries clumsy light with the darkness he wields so effectively. He’d worried, at first, that if the luxon was conscious perhaps his prowess with its magic would wane, but he learns to utilize them in tandem. Besides, a lack of faith has never hindered his use of dunamancy before.

And still he has not had use to heal, and he feels as though he is failing. 

That night, he is on watch with Caleb, as the others fall asleep, and they look up to the night sky. “Do you truly believe that the gods speak with mortals?” he asks softly, and Caleb looks at him with the keen eye that pierced him when he’d seen the light. 

“Strangely enough, you are not the first to ask me such a question,” Caleb answers. “Has a god taken an interest in you?”

Essek huffs out a laugh. “I suppose that is one way of putting it. A while back, the Everlight… offered me illumination, for lack of any more coherent explanation.”

Caleb stares into the darkness with the absent look that means he is delving deep into his memory. “I know very little of the Everlight herself,” he says, “aside from what I know of her from the Calamity. The halls of history claim she believed even the Lord of Hells capable of redemption, and was betrayed for that faith. Much of what was known about her and her worship was lost because of that devastation.”

“Well,” Essek swallows. “I hope I do not disappoint her in such a way.”

“I think it would be very difficult for one drow to cause such a rift as that,” Caleb smiles. “Not that you are not a very important drow.”

It’s meant to be teasing, but Essek runs a hand over his face. “I have already caused a rift that nearly tore this continent in two,” he says, and Caleb’s smile falters.

“And she has still reached out to you,” he says, his eyes deadly serious, with that fiery intensity Essek is all too familiar with. “Like we have reached out to you. And you have not disappointed us yet.”

Breath caught in his throat, Essek doesn’t even trust himself to speak as Caleb pats his cheek and turns back toward the darkness.

— 

When he creates a shadow of himself, another thing that can kill, he wonders what good learning the light is when darkness feels more powerful.

He knows it’s because he has spent over a century learning dunamancy, and only a few months learning… whatever he is learning now, with little guidance and less certainty that this is the path he is meant to take. But when he burns instead of crushes, it feels like an empty echo of all that he knows he’s capable of.

And he is capable of quite a lot, plenty of power behind the spells he can uses in combat, tearing away enemies before they can reach his friends. He wonders if perhaps he was wrong, that his purpose lies in preventing harm rather than healing it, and he struggles to bring himself to meditate on anything beyond that, even now that he has something to meditate towards.

Gods, what he’d give to get his hands on a beacon now, free from the limitations of the Dynasty. The Assembly has one, that even the king doesn’t know about, and he thinks that stealing it might be the easiest way to get ahold of one—it wouldn’t be easy, to steal from the Cerberus Assembly, but it would also not restart a war, and he won’t make any suggestions to the party that would cause that. 

The idea of it floats to mind, sometimes, in his weaker moments at night, but he is getting better at suppressing those impulses.

It just feels like if he knew what this other entity that has him in its grasp was, he would feel more comfortable living in the interim between it and a god. As it is, he feels as though he’s wavering on the edge of a decision, but never fully committing to one or the other.

On nights when they stay in seedy inns and taverns, he often finds himself reading well into the evening, in a booth with a strong drink to nurse over the hours after his companions retire before his anxious brain has settled enough to rest. Often he is the last person in the bar, aside from a barkeep who has swept every area but the one he’s occupying, sometimes absorbed by books and sometimes staring at the same sentence over and over with his head in his hands, trying to parse out what his life has become.

It is hard to plan anything when you’re not sure if you’ll live past tomorrow, and the friends he has chosen tend to be liberal with where they get into trouble.

It is on a night where he is too caught in his thoughts to read that someone sidles into the booth beside him. Caleb sniffs the drink that he has long since abandoned and cringes, but takes a drink from it anyway. “Hello.”

“What are you doing awake?” Essek murmurs, peering toward him between his fingers, pressed over his eyes in a futile attempt to focus. 

“Couldn’t sleep, thinking too much about that spell we were working on,” he shrugs, and takes another drink. It is strong enough that his cheeks, sallow from exhaustion, tinge with pink. “How do you drink this?”

Essek laughs. “You have not tasted Rosohna liquor.”

“You brought us your wine, that time you came for dinner.”

“I brought the wine I thought you all would be able to handle.”

He revels in the flush that comes over Caleb’s face, the way his nose wrinkles and his lips pout just enough to be noticeable. “Well, thank you for protecting us delicate mortals.”

Essek flushes himself. “Did you think to look over that spell again?”

Resting his chin in his palm, Caleb stares absently, taking another sip and cringing yet again. “I don’t think so. I was only wondering… I don’t know what your goals are, now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, do you still want to learn about the luxon, if you have other… avenues of magic to pursue?” 

Essek laughs his scoff of laughter, the one that he used so often as part of his icy persona in the Lucid Bastion, and immediately regrets it—it is a noise that makes him think of loneliness and isolation, and he tries very hard these days to keep himself from returning to that. “No, no. I suppose I am still interested in the same things as I was. It just feels rather less pressing, away from Rosohna. But…” 

He closes his book as he leans forward on his palm, mirroring Caleb’s position. Caleb shifts to turn his full attention toward him, with the quiet everpresent intensity that Essek has grown only a bit more comfortable being pinned beneath.

“I don’t particularly feel as though I have… any goal, really. The Everlight… she has not asked anything of me, really.” It is uncomfortable to wonder what a god may want from you—gods tend to want favors when they bestow power.

They must, or Essek does not understand anything about how the world works. Why should he be chosen, if there is nothing he can offer? Why not someone more worthy?

Perhaps that is why he does not understand the luxon—it seems too good to be true. Enormous arcane power, in addition to the strange reincarnation abilities? Essek has always wondered how his mother can devote so much of her being to an entity that does not ask it of her. But then, isn’t that what he has done his entire life? At least she has not made it impossible for herself to go home without potential harm to herself. They have not discovered his treachery, but if anyone did, he would prefer to be well away from the Dynasty when they do.

He wonders if Caleb struggled as much as he does to understand his parents, to comprehend the circumstances of his existence. Only recently has Essek thought to wonder why he should’ve been born as he was, to a family of such standing, especially when his parents certainly had expected both he and his brother to be other consecuted individuals. 

When that had not been the case, they had tried their hardest to raise them both with relative normalcy, but he thinks that both he and his brother perhaps held onto those delusions of grandeur too tightly. It is hard to let go once you have been told you are destined for greatness, have achieved it already. It is hard to not seek to remedy it when you realize that no former life has created a name for you now. 

In his weaker moments, he thinks that the only reason he took Sarenrae’s offer was to find another path to greatness.

He does not ask Caleb if he understood his parents. Caleb has not told him what became of his parents, but he knows enough not to broach that subject. He does say, “Have I mentioned my brother to you?”

Caleb blinks. “No. You have a brother?”

“Well, I suppose I have many siblings, in various lives—lineage is… perhaps less important than you might think, among the dens. It is all _family_ , of different degrees. But yes. I have a younger brother.”

“And he is not…”

“No, he is like me. On his first life.” Essek sighs, and passes his fingers over his face. “We haven’t often spoke, in the last few decades. He is… he is also very unlike me. As much as he also wants to… be someone, he chose goodness over greatness.” Essek smiles ruefully. “Funny how that has worked out.”

“Where is he now? Do you think you might… reconnect with him?”

“No, no, I don’t imagine so. Not for a long time, if ever. It is probably for the best. I always had a much harder time lying to him than anyone else. For all of our differences… our upbringing was unique, I suppose. And even lying by omission…” His stilted sentences catch on his tongue. “Well, I don’t believe even decades of absence could make his heart fond enough to forgive treason.”

“And if you returned as a cleric of the goddess of redemption?”

Essek laughs. He imagines waltzing back to the Dynasty worshipping a member of the pantheon that cleaved through the land on which his culture has built. “In that case, I think Verin may be the only one capable of forgiving me.”

“Ah. Right. I suppose I sometimes forget that the Dynasty is so theocratic. The luxon seems quite arcane to me.”

They’ve had this conversation before, and Essek smiles. “Yes, I agree. Unfortunately, it is hard to forget when you have grown up a nonbeliever among zealots.”

“I can imagine.”

“I don’t think my brother has ever believed either, but he was always better at… the ceremony of it, I suppose?” He wrings his hands for lack of anywhere else to put this constant anxiety that he carries now. It is not something he ever learned as a child, where to put his fear of doing the wrong thing. “I mean, I… put on a good charade, I learned so early to lie about my doubts, but… to this day I’m not even sure that he does not believe. But I also don’t think he would trust me with the information—I may have learned to lie, but he learned that I would do what benefited me with information I was given, and he protected himself in his own way.”

Caleb nudges his elbow gently. “You are learning otherwise, though.”

Essek exhales, a long hiss of a breath, perpetually uncomfortable with Caleb’s reassurances. There is far more trust here than there was, so long and just a moment ago, but he still cannot comprehend the opportunities they give him. They’d promised him one, and here he was, still reassured yet again.

He doesn’t deserve it, no more than he deserves what the Everlight has bestowed upon him, if there is no pretense to it. If there is nothing he can offer in return…

He doesn’t know how to live with himself.

“Come to bed,” Caleb says gently. “Rest.”

“I don’t think there is a room for me.” He’s used to taking his rest in tavern booths, where he can both pay attention to anyone entering the building and where he doesn’t have to pay for an extra room, as uncomfortable as he often is asking anyone to share their space with him when it isn’t necessary.

“Come to ours.” Caleb presses his lips to Essek’s temple as he sidles to his feet, and Essek freezes, his hands in midair.

“I don’t think Veth will be altogether pleased, waking to me around.”

“Veth cares about you, as much as the rest of us do.” Caleb doesn’t move, not without an answer that he’s satisfied with. “You look exhausted.”

Essek feels exhausted, eyes stinging and dry, but he takes another sip of his drink. It’s half-full in front of him, even with Caleb’s paltry help. “Perhaps once I finish this. No use wasting good alcohol.”

“No.” And Caleb, in a moment so quick Essek’s tired eyes barely follow it, snatches the liquor from the table and downs it. When he sets down the empty glass, his face burns as much as Essek imagines his throat must, but his eyes are steely in their resolve. “I will not permit you to run yourself ragged. We need every healer we have at their full capacity, with the shit we get into.”

Essek scoffs at his outstretched hand. “I have not been able to heal anyone yet, except by accident.”

“Then maybe you should stop wondering if you are worthy to heal, and start fucking doing it instead,” Caleb snarls, and the words hit him like he’s been slapped. “You have healed Beau, once. You are a healer. So fucking figure it out. And come to bed, now.”

Essek almost splutters for a moment, but he lets himself take Caleb’s hand, a command he cannot reject in his exhaustion, and collects his books. He has to catch Caleb on the stairs, the alcohol catching up to him quickly as Essek had a feeling it would, and helps them both to bed.

When Veth wakes to them sharing the second bed, backs to each other and furiously refusing to touch, her screeches wake them both from their varying levels of rest, and even though she doesn’t mention it to the rest of the group, Essek can’t look at her without his face burning for the rest of the day.

— 

He does learn to heal though, soon enough.

Jester falls unconscious fighting back to back with him, and he drops to his knees beside her. The shout from his mouth is alien to him, with dominance he didn’t know he possessed, but is not surprised to hear it when he is the only one nearby between Jester and the beast they are fighting. “ _Stop!_ ”

It freezes mid-swing, and he whispers to Jester, watching energy glow into her skin. Her eyes flutter open, slow at first, then go wide, and she throws a hand out and screams, and the thing withers within an inch of its life, before Beau’s staff cleaves it in two.

“Essek,” Jester murmurs, and clutches his hand. “You saved me!”

He thinks back to that night, watching the rise and fall of Jester’s breath so soon after she’d died, and he laughs. His skin buzzes with adrenaline and magic, and he thinks that healing is the most intoxicating form of enchantment he’s ever woven. Perhaps that is why his guard is down enough to say, “Jester, I only learned to heal so that I could save you.”

She frowns at him as she sits up, the others tending to each other for the time being, Caduceus beginning to weave a prayer into the air. “What do you mean?”

“That day when you and Caleb died… I couldn’t do anything. I only watched. I…” he is starting to get self-conscious, and he ducks his head as he adds, “I couldn’t let that happen again. Not when you have both done so much for me. So… I have learned now.”

Jester smiles sideways at him. “That’s very sweet of you, Essek.”

“Well, I’d rather you not tell the others about it. Especially not Caleb. It’ll ruin my cold reputation.”

She giggles at what he hopes came across as a joke. “I don’t think you’re cold, Essek. But your secret is safe with me.”

— 

He wants to weeps for the responses he prays for, as he rests at night, whether he is on the cold packed ground of their camp or in a tavern booth or, on a few occasions, tucked away in the study of the Xhorhaus. 

Night after night, he pushes his thoughts toward the Everlight, his hands alight and his eyes turned toward the sky, and wonders if perhaps he should be asking her guidance in the sunlight, where he is most vulnerable.

But she met him beneath a star-scarred sky, and that is where he feels most able to ask for anything, under cover of darkness.

Perhaps that is the problem—it isn’t a thought he allows himself to often entertain, but it lingers, below the surface of his mind, where he can ignore the possibility. Favors he knows. Favors he understands. But so far all she has done is given, and it feels as though asking guidance puts him further in debt.

Still, he prays, and restrains the part of him that wants to scream, in case a tantrum at the sky might garner some attention. Of course, he thinks that it also might make him feel better, but he’s always been good at self-punishment.

It is, after all, what has gotten him this far.

But as many nights as he wishes to scream, to sob, to demand answers to why—why he was chosen, why he should continue on whatever path this is, why _him_ —as the night pass, he cannot bring himself to ask anymore of the god who has taken such an unlikely interest in him.

Answers, as much as he has spent his life seeking them out, have never come as easy as questions. Questions rise to his mind like bubbles to the surface of a sea, and he spends his hours pondering them, with or without the means to set them to rest. 

A leap of faith. He’s never made a leap of faith in his life, and here he is, with his fingers aglow and his hands steepled in what he imagines must be prayer, though it feels more like desperation than anything else. He wonders why the gods answer mortals, if that is the only thing they are met with. Are there other ways to ask the favor they might grant? 

He cannot imagine granting wishes for millennia, as much as he has spent most of his time in his work answering to the whims of those who seem to know so much less than he does. Perhaps that is why immortality was always so uninteresting to him than it was to those around him, the ones who always seemed to do the demanding. 

Answering demands is not what he would call enjoyable, and he imagines that the more powerful one gets, the less enjoyable it becomes. 

He wonders what the Everlight must think of these meandering prayers he sends to her, once his mind has wandered beyond whatever initial question he has raised tonight. Is it amusing to her, to watch him wonder? Or is it tiring?

Perhaps she doesn’t answer because she has already tossed him aside.

Every time he keeps a friend alive in battle, deflects attacks aimed for him, he knows that cannot be true—that he is still carrying whatever light she has given him.

But as much as he promised to continue to do so, he still cannot fathom what that means, and without further guidance, he spends his nights fretfully asking whether she is satisfied with the restless wandering that he has been participating in with his friends, whose whims seem to take them all over the continent and occasionally the globe.

And every morning the sun breaks, softly waking him from his rest, and the light feels like another question asked back at him, without any answers in sight.

— 

It is only when Caduceus and Jester approach him one evening with conspiring smiles that their group’s new connection to the realm of the divine is a subject broached as a group, when they sit together while Caleb starts to weave magic to create their residence for the night. 

“When Fjord became a follower of the Wildmother, I had her holy symbol forged for him,” Caduceus says, and Essek’s face flushes as Jester dances at his side, hands held behind her back, and he thinks he knows what’s coming. 

“We didn’t really have access to a _forge_ right now,” Jester drawls, and with the mild consternation on Caduceus’ face, Essek thinks she’s likely cut off some speech of divine wisdom that he was about to impart in her excitement. “ _But_ I think we made something really cool for you!”

She offers out a pendant, and he peers closer at it. 

It is a mishmash of things, crafted neatly together by clever hands—likely Jester’s, knowing the artistic ability of the rest of the group. He recognizes the things one by one—a pressed flower, a button, a bit of lichen, a seashell, a pearl—and Jester’s magic paint holding them all in place. A blue ribbon makes up the chain, one he recognizes from what Beau uses to tie her hair back. Something of each of them, combined to form the symbol of the Everlight. 

He can barely restrain the tears that threaten to well in his eyes as he takes it in his hands. His embarrassment at their attention forgotten, he stares down at it, fingers exploring its strange feel, and he thinks the only gift he has been given more precious than this was the one they gave to him in the hull of their ship. 

“Thank you,” he exhales, and holds it to his chest. 

“We thought, you know, since you’re a super cool cleric just like us—” Jester says, and Caduceus, still a bit miffed—as much as he’ll ever show it—interrupts her this time.

“Well, I don’t know about _just like_ ,” he says, “I think the Traveler is a little different than the Everlight.”

Jester rolls her eyes. “Okay, but they’re both, like, really cool, obviously,” she huffs, and immediately forgets the slight as she throws her arms around Essek’s neck. The symbol still bites into his chest, a reminder of the gifts he has been given by his friends. He never forgets, of course, dwells on it during plenty of his waking time, but the physical reminder is nice.

It is not something he would’ve ever believed he deserved, but he’s starting to learn through his friends and his new patron that what he believes he deserves is not in fact what matters.

“ _Thank you,_ ” he says again, looking at the group over Jester’s shoulder. “All of you.”

That night, as he rests, he hears a soft, familiar voice in his head. 

“ _It is more than just I who believes you are worthy_ ,” it murmurs, and a warm glow settles behind his closed eyelids and soaks into the symbol tucked beneath his shirt.

— 

When the three of them enter the library, a dark-skinned elf with a face he recognizes the shape of catches their eye, their sharp eyes narrowing as they make a beeline for the group, and for the first time in a while, Essek thinks he knows what’s about to happen before Beau or Caleb have figured it out.

Dairon is very obviously not a drow, but the edges of their face give them away. The expositor adornments mean he puts together what is happening very quickly. 

“Ah, we might have a problem,” he murmurs under his breath, just before the expositor reaches them.

“Beauregard, may we have a word,” Dairon hisses, eyes narrowed at him, and he tries his best to look perfectly innocent, but he has a feeling both of them know that isn’t true.

“Oh, yeah,” Beau says, looking between the elves as they stare pointedly at each other. “Uh, Dairon, Essek—”

“You have introduced us before,” Essek comments stiffly, and Beau bobs her head, trying to stay casual.

Caleb has said nothing, but he looks as though he’s enjoying this exchange tremendously, failing to hide the glee on his face.

“Yes. Good to see you,” Dairon says, in a way that makes him think it is not at all good. “Beauregard. A word.”

The elf leads her away, and she glances over her shoulder at Caleb desperately like a sibling waiting to be scolded. Caleb’s grin is rapidly spreading on his face now that Dairon has turned their back, and he snickers into his fingers as he turns and leans on Essek’s shoulder with his bandaged arm.

“Your _housekeeper_ was our spy all along?” Essek says incredulously, as low as his voice is capable of going, and Caleb just laughs harder. 

“Oh, oh, I’m sorry, I just… Beau did not even think about this when she agreed to bring us here, and it is delightful to watch.”

“Did you think about it?”

“No, of course not,” Caleb giggled. “But I am not Dairon’s pet project.”

“ _Ah_.” Essek thinks back to that day they had met, when Dairon had responded so stiffly to Beau’s orders. He’d been a little suspicious, but had assumed they had come across a housekeeper unaccustomed to humans. 

And then, days later, someone had broken into several important locations, in his guise.

In retrospect, he should’ve known. He’d been too busy being suspicious of the Nein that he hadn’t even considered that anyone around them was not of the Dynasty.

Caleb is still breathless with laughter as Beau returns with Dairon at her heels, and his stomach feels like a weight has settled there. He searches their faces to see whether Beau might’ve betrayed what he fears, but nothing comes of their terse approach.

“Well, Mr. Thelyss, it is… good to see you,” Dairon says, and this time she might almost mean it. With a curt nod, the expositor rushes off into the hallows of the library, and Beau looks somewhere between bewildered and angry.

“You didn’t tell us someone had impersonated you!” she hisses.

“And you didn’t tell me that your housekeeper was an expositor of the Cobalt Soul,” he retorts, as quietly as he can manage as she leads them into the library. “That was why I had so much security, that time I came to see you.” The pit of his stomach has not let up, and he glances over his shoulder in case Dairon is returning with guards. “You did not mention—”

“No, no, gods, no,” Beau says, and seems almost betrayed that he would wonder. “Dairon just thinks you’re a high-level Dynasty official. I just told her that you’re no longer the Shadowhand, and that you aren’t in contact with the Dynasty anymore. Cool?”

He nods, the anxiety still circling in his veins. “Cool, I suppose.”

“Like, I’m an expositor. I exposited. I can handle you myself.”

“I believe you _exposed_ , Beauregard,” Caleb says, mirth still bright on his face, and his calm joy settles Essek’s stomach a bit.

“Yeah, whatever. I’ve got this.” She starts to pull books off shelves and stack them in Caleb’s waiting arms.

“Yes, well. Whenever you feel you are ready to punish, I will take what you choose to mete out.”

Beau freezes and blinks at him. Caleb staggers to a stop with his books. “Oh, was it not clear? We’re your punishment. The Mighty Nein. We’re your fucking reckoning. You gotta deal with us forever.”

“Ah. There is a flaw with that plan.”

“Which is?”

“I will outlive you.”

Her face curls into a grin. “And by that time, you will be so attached to us that you’ll throw yourself onto our funeral pyres, because you can’t bear the thought of living without us.”

It’s a joke, but it hits him like a ton of bricks. He knows, technically, that he will outlive the Mighty Nein by centuries, that most of them will have long passed by the time he has just reached middle age. But only right now, with the realization that his companions know that as well as he does, does he really acknowledge what that means.

Caleb drops his stack of books to the table with an echoing thud, eliciting angry hisses from nearby researchers, and he turns to see the look on Essek’s face, ashen as he must be. “Beau,” he mutters as he pushes Essek into a seat, and Beau shrugs.

“What? We all know it’s true.”

“I don’t think you are helping anyone by being so morbid. Here,” he says, and Essek barely registers his words as he presses a book into Essek’s hands. “Read about your goddess.”

Essek peers down at it, an old tome of the pantheon of Exandria. It looks like it has been amended recently, pages stitched into the back, with enough skill to be almost unnoticeable. When he flips through these new pages, he finds the current academia about the Everlight, whose worship had been nearly lost after the Divergence.

Only with a few temples in Tal’Dorei and a recently uncovered ruin in Vasselheim has she returned to a more prominent role among the pantheon, and it is enough to pull him from his thoughts of life after the Mighty Nein.

He thinks of the way his hands burn in battle with divine energy, fire razing their enemies, and Caleb’s lifeless body heaving back to life under the magic of the Wildmother, contrasted so sharply with how much fire is reflected in his eyes now as he reads.

Perhaps he is already standing on the edge of that funeral pyre, willing his friends not to come any closer than they need to right now. 

He cannot bring himself to tell Beau that her punishment is working—not even when she catches him drinking in the joy of Caleb laughing under his breath as Dairon passes behind him, trying not to catch their eye.

“The luxon,” he murmurs when he leans forward, once Dairon has left earshot, as much an attempt to distract Beau from her inquisitive glance as to ask the question. “Does the Cobalt Soul know anything that perhaps the Assembly has not told me?”

She raises an eyebrow, the smirk not entirely gone from her face. “The Cobalt Soul and the Assembly don’t really ‘get along’.” She shrugs. “If there’s something they haven’t sent you, they definitely haven’t given us shit.”

“I think it is safe to assume that there is plenty they have not sent,” Caleb murmurs, eyes boring into his book, though they are not moving enough for him to be reading. “They did not tell you about that vial we brought to you, ja? Nor have they mentioned… whatever is going on in…”

His voice trails off, and he and Beau share a look that Essek can’t decipher, but he knows it’s not something he can ask about. 

“Yes, yes, I have been played,” Essek hisses. “I understand that now.”

“But hey, it was the first time you ever trusted anybody,” Beau offers casually, reaching across the table to pat his shoulder. “It’s like… you know that really shitty first ex?”

“…No?” Essek says.

“Yes,” Caleb nods, and this time, Essek _almost_ wants to ask.

“Like, you fucked up on the judgment call the first time, ‘cause you were young and a dumbass, but hey, at least you did better with us, right?” she offers generously, and he stares at her. “That’s a way better track record than most of the chicks I knew in Kamordah.”

“Delightful,” Essek drawls. He is suddenly wishing he had not asked the question, safely assumed that Beau would’ve mentioned any research into the beacons the library might’ve contained and moved on. But there is simply not enough written down about the god whose worship he has almost inadvertently fallen into, and he finds his mind straying back to the religion he has rejected. 

He is caught between an entity whose secrets are carefully guarded by the culture he has abandoned and a deity whose worship has only begun to be recovered, and it is maddening that his usual methods of research will not work on either. If any more common deity had taken an interest in him, he would’ve had plenty of documentation to work with, but there is very little interest in the Everlight in Wildemount, as it stands.

He wonders fancifully for a moment if that is his purpose, but he has never been very good at evangelizing. He harbors far too many doubts for that, and he thinks that if that is what his goddess requests, then she has misunderstood his nature. 

“Have you perhaps considered visiting the temples of the Everlight on other continents?” Caleb murmurs, watching as Essek scrutinizes the neat script at the end of the news pages detailing the planned research the Cobalt Soul continues to do into the worship of Sarenrae. “We could be in Emon or Vasselheim in an instant, if you wanted to learn more.”

Essek has considered that, and has been close to going alone on several occasions in the past, but he can’t bring himself to close the distance. And with Caleb’s offer—he is not sure the others would understand if he went alone.

And he thinks that he must go alone, if he is to gain any insight as to what he needs to do.

The Everlight has only rarely spoken to mortals on this plane, and without the proof of his newfound power, he might’ve dismissed the communication he has already had with her as a figment of his imagination. To ask another priest of Sarenrae why _him_ … He cannot bring himself to get that kind of answer in front of his friends.

Because in all of the time with them, they have never explained either, why him. It felt very explicit that he was cordial to them only for what use they could be to him later, and once the truth was out, there was even less reason for them to cling to him, and yet they have not let him go. And he would not know what to do with himself if they did now, of course, but that does not mean he hasn’t spent too many hours wondering why.

So to ask why Sarenrae chose him… perhaps hearing an answer from another might make them realize that they don’t have one. That there is no reason for him to be with them, and that they are better off leaving him behind. 

And as much as he knows that’s no less than he deserves, he cannot bear the thought, anymore than he can bear to think what he will do once they are buried and gone, and he is once again alone.

— 

Being on watch with someone else is sometimes calming and sometimes uncomfortable, but with Jester, it always feels a bit like what she claims a sleepover is like.

“Jester,” he asks once, as she braids the strands of his hair that have grown out enough to get in his eyes, “have you ever actually had a sleepover?”

“Uh, yeah,” she says, “we have sleepovers like, every night.”

He doesn’t press the subject beyond that. He certainly never had a childhood that would’ve facilitated that kind of thing, nor did he have the temperament for friendships either, so he has no way to dispute her.

Still, he does imagine that this is at least a little what she claims it is, as she lays with her head resting on his stomach and they stare at the stars, ears keen to listen for any incoming threats. He points out the constellations he knows, which is most of them, and she points out where she sees stars that make up lewd images. He thinks she does it mostly to torment him, to turn one of his fields of interest into a farce for a little bit, but he still enjoys it as much as it makes his face burn when she describes what she’s pointing at.

It makes him laugh. And he’s never laughed enough, he’s beginning to realize.

“Jester,” he says one night, when he’s resting with his head leaned back against her shoulder as she sketches. It’s a level of intimacy that he has always been most comfortable with with Jester, but maybe that’s because it doesn’t accompany any pretense. “Does the Traveler… ask you to do things?”

“I mean, he asks me to spread chaos.” He can feel her shrug against his back. “I’m very good at that.” 

He laughs. “Yes, you certainly are. But… what does that do? For him, I mean?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know. It makes him laugh, I think.”

He cannot fathom a god whose only mandate is to make them laugh. But then, he is not talking to someone with a typical god. Perhaps this was a question better suited for Caduceus or Fjord. “Do you think… do you think the gods always ask things of us? Or are there other reasons they might be interested in us?”

“Well, the Traveler came and hung out with me ‘cause I was lonely,” she says, and holds out her journal for him to evaluate; it is a beautiful if overdramatized rendering of Beau’s killing blow against a fiend they fought that day. He nods in approval, and she turns to the next page. “How does your god talk to you?”

“Well, sometimes she just… plants thoughts, I suppose. Small things. I met her in a dream, when she first… accepted me? Asked if I would accept her? But I have not seen her since.”

“Hmm,” Jester says critically, as though she doesn’t much care for gods who do not come to visit their followers, like some kind of regular check-up. “That’s sad. You’re a really cool person to talk to; you’d think she’d be, like, getting in a flying chariot to come visit you, so you could hang out.”

Essek opts not to try to explain the subtleties of the Divergence or the Divine Gate. He’s certain Jester would understand them—she’s far brighter than most people give her credit for, he’s learned to realize—but some nights he is looking for answers rather than offering them. 

Most nights, recently, if he’s being honest with himself.

“I don’t know that Sarenrae has a flying chariot,” he says instead. “She does have wings, though.”

“Ooooh!” Jester squeals, and turns back to her journal with renewed vigor. “What does she look like? Is she _gorgeous_?” 

He imagines his vision, where he’d been in too much awe to really consider beauty in terms anything less than divine. “She’s… she’s beautiful. In the same way that a sunrise is beautiful, when it is soft and hazy and the dew has not yet melted. Almost like a dream.”

“Like when it almost doesn’t feel like you’ve woken up yet,” Jester says softly, and he nods. 

“Yes.”

She sighs, a romantic, pretty sigh, and she leans her own head back against the curve of his neck. “Essek, that’s _lovely_.”

He smiles. “Now if only I could decipher what she wants with me.”

“Maybe she only wants you to keep being you,” she says. “You’re helping us a whole bunch, with your spells. And you’re… you’re learning to be good, Essek. You’re very good.”

Essek still can’t quite believe that he has reached a point where someone as… _good_ as Jester thinks the same of him, but he is glad at least to call her a friend. “I hope I can continue to be so.”

“I think you can.” She flips her journal to a new page and holds out her pencil. “Okay, now describe _exactly_ what she looks like.”

— 

It is enough, for a while. It is enough until they find Caleb, sobbing in a cavernous underground chamber where they have fought long and hard to the point of losing track of each other amidst tunnels and invisibility spells, clutching the lifeless body of Veth in his arms as he rocks her back and forth.

It is enough until he teleports them to Nicodranas, to a husband who weeps even as he tells them not to tell Luc, until they march to the lighthouse temple of the Wildmother to a place to craft an elaborate ritual that he is not powerful enough to weave.

It is enough until Yeza Brenatto stands over his wife’s body and pleads for her to return, begs for Veth’s soul.

And she does return, but that doesn’t make it any less painful to meet Caleb’s red-rimmed eyes and know that if it comes to it, this is not something he is yet powerful enough to wield.

He leaves the Lavish Chateau where they stay that night and wanders along the coast until he is alone and beyond the view of the city lights, and collapses into the sand, a far cry from the luminous shore on which he stood in a dream.

“What can I do?” he asks, sobs that he has suppressed all day heaving without his permission in his chest. “I need to be more powerful. What can I do?” 

And he waits, on his knees on the beach, waits without an answer until he falls into his trance, and wakes to the glow of the eastern sun, and he finds that he has an answer, vague and nebulous as the command is, but his goddess asks it, so he will do his best to fulfill her wishes. It is more of a wish for him than anything else he has received so far, and he grips it with cold fingers only now learning to love the warmth of a fire.

“ _You can help._ ” 

He does, as much as he can, in every town they pass through, in every place they step. He asks around for where they can do work, pushes the rest of them to join him—even in places where his drow figure causes bartenders to shift away and avoid his eye, he does not allow himself to see the worst in people, or to see them as unchangeable.

He does not allow himself to see in others what he stills sees the ruins of in himself, and he thinks he may one day learn to forgive even his own transgressions.

— 

In one town, though, he is directed to a gaggle of children staying with a local old woman. Their clothes have been washed and mended as much as possible, but they still bear the scent of smoke and their eyes reflect the flames that have been out for a few days, and Jester is already dancing around measuring them as she describes the new clothes she’s going to buy for them to replace the ones that they’ve lost in the fire that claimed their parents and their home when Essek catches Caleb slip out of a side door, his face as ashen as the plot of land in which this family lived.

He excuses himself as Caduceus gets involved while Beau and Yasha give them piggy back rides, and finds Caleb crouched with one hand pressed to the back wall and the other clawing into the bandages on his arm, curled into a crouch and breathing so fast he’s on the verge of throwing up. 

Essek doesn’t say anything as he crouches beside him, and registers in some distractable portion of his mind that he once would’ve floated to keep his boots out of the mud here behind the house, but now the soles of his shoes squelch as he moves.

This is a worse attack than any he has seen Caleb experience yet, and he wishes for a moment that Veth was not still with her family—he understands that staying with them after her resurrection was probably the best for all of the Brenattos, and that she will likely return eventually, so accustomed to the road as she is, but for now, he thinks that she would’ve been the easiest person to ask to help Caleb with whatever is wrong now.

It’s up to him at the moment though, so he presses one palm tightly to Caleb’s shoulder, and murmurs, “I’m here. You’re safe. I am here.”

Caleb’s breathing shudders for several more minutes before he can even look up, but eventually he turns and collapses into the mud, leaning into Essek’s thigh, and Essek holds his own hand to the building to keep from falling over. “I’m sorry,” Caleb breathes, but Essek shakes his head and uses his free hand to brush Caleb’s hair from his face. Finally, he sits beside him, feeling the wet earth already soaking through his clothes, and lets Caleb rest on his shoulder.

“There is nothing to apologize for. You have done nothing wrong.”

They remain there for a long time, Caleb’s breath shaking on every inhale and exhale, and eventually Beau sidles up beside them, crouching on Caleb’s other side. “You’re alright,” she says, and claps his shoulder. She meets Essek’s eyes and gives him an appreciative nod. “You’re with us, man. You’re alright. We got you.”

“Do you want to get up, Caleb?” Fjord asks, offering a hand, and Caleb nods, taking it. Essek and Beau help catch his elbows, pulling him from the muck, and Essek immediately sweeps the dirt off of their clothes. 

“Thank—thank you,” Caleb mutters, eyes unfocused and unable to meet anyone else’s, and they escort him protectively back to the tavern. “Where are the others?”

“Yasha, Jester, and Cad went to go get some clothes for those kids,” Beau says. “We’ll meet them for dinner. For now we’re all gonna get a drink, okay?”

“Ja, okay,” Caleb says, but he’s only half-listening. When Essek gives Beau a questioning look, she shakes her head and returns it with a glare.

Caleb has barely touched his drink by the time the others return, and there’s nothing in this little bar that will get Essek past buzzed, so by the time everyone starts heading to bed they’re both very sober. Jester and Caduceus are as well, as usual, but Caleb has been very careful not to let on too much about how bad his panic attack was since they’d returned, and when the other clerics head to bed, Essek pulls out his books under pretense of staying up to read. 

“Caleb,” he says lightly, as Beau heads off to sleep with her arms over the other girls’ shoulders, and Caleb pauses where he’d been ready to follow Fjord and Caduceus up the stairs. “Could you help me with a spell before you go to sleep? It’s a tricky bit of evocation magic that I have been puzzling over.”

Caleb nods and settles back into the seat beside Essek, and almost absently summons Frumpkin to his lap. The cat kneads his paws, walking back and forth over their legs, and settles, purring, with his body between Caleb’s legs and his chin resting on Essek’s knee.

Essek scratches his head without thinking, and watches some of the light return to Caleb’s eyes as his cat makes a small mrrrp of pleasure.

“I imagine you do not in fact want to go over a spell,” Caleb says, once the girls have disappeared, and he doesn’t seem defensive enough that Essek hesitates to answer.

“No, not exactly,” he says, though he barely restrains himself from squirming uncomfortably before he continues, “I wanted to make sure that you were alright.”

“Yes, ja, I am fine.” Caleb still isn’t quite meeting his eye, and Essek presses his fingers together before holding out a hand. 

“May I—” he asks, and Caleb purses his lips before he pushes his fingertips into his covered arms. 

“We should…” He stops, and looks toward the few other patrons still in the bar, the innkeeper wiping down glasses. “Not here. It’s… I would tell you… upstairs. Upstairs, I will tell you.” And he stands so suddenly that Frumpkin hisses with dissatisfaction as he is thrown to the ground. Caleb picks him up apologetically and lets him wrap around his neck like a scarf, and the purring continues. 

He holds out a hand himself, and Essek looks between it and his face for a moment before closing his book. “You do not need to tell me if you don’t feel comfortable,” he says as he stands, and Caleb shrugs. “Just let me know if there is anything I can do.”

“I do need to tell you. Perhaps you should know. I know… well, perhaps not all, but many of your skeletons. It is only fair that you know mine.”

So Essek swallows down any further deflections that he might’ve used to back out of the conversation, and follows him to his room. 

He’s been spending more nights in taverns and inns sharing a room with Caleb, so it doesn’t feel too unnerving when Caleb closes and locks the door behind him. “You are not planning on killing me once I know your secrets, are you?” Essek says, hoping it came out as joking as he’d intended it, but Caleb merely sinks into a chair at a rickety desk in the corner and rubs his hands over his face.

Very slowly he unwraps the bandages on his arms. Essek has seen the scars before—saw similar ones on the arms of the scourger he himself had killed, on Caleb’s command—but it still makes bile rise to his throat to imagine what has created these rifts in his skin.

“You know that I was in training to be one of the volstrucker,” he says lowly, and offers his arms. The bed is not close enough, so Essek kneels in front of him to examine the scars; symmetrical and deliberate, he can see the hint of patterns that might suggest a purpose. “I was trained and… altered, individually, by Trent Ikithon. He… he implanted residuum crystal into our skin to cement our power, and memories into our minds to cement our allegiances.”

There is no residuum in his arms now, and the memories of patriotism or national ideals are long gone. Essek imagines he has never known this man with either, as he remembers the way he presented a stolen beacon to the Bright Queen. 

“To… prove our loyalties, we had to torture and kill… traitors.” Caleb says the word quickly, and his eyes flicker to Essek and then back to the ground. Essek can only imagine what Trent Ikithon must have thought of him, in conversations when Essek wasn’t present. He does not think it was flattering. “And to complete our training, we were told to do the same to… those closest to us. Traitors, we were led to believe. I think all of us had an inkling, clever as we were, when we set out that something was amiss, but…” He shakes his head, and Essek swallows hard as Caleb continues talking. 

“My compatriots were far stronger than I was—they killed their parents directly, watched them die in front of us. I only heard my mother and father scream over the flames, and that was when…” He’s… almost laughing, deliriously, and Essek reaches out tentatively, presses a palm into Caleb’s hand, grounding him here. “I broke. By then it was too late, but… something broke in my head. They dragged me off to an asylum north of Rexxentrum, where I stayed for eleven years.”

When Caleb is distracted with a magical project or excited to follow research, Essek cannot imagine him in that kind of state, but right now, with his absent eyes and his irregular breathing, he can see what that must’ve been like. 

“So… those children…” Essek says, and Caleb shrugs. 

“Not just the children, the situation, I suppose. It… I could smell the ash, in that house.”

Essek doesn’t mention that Caleb uses fire in battle everyday, has invented spells designed to burn the life out of things. He has caused the death of a parent, even if the situation differed. He can understand that sometimes it is easy to forget, and other times it is impossible.

He should have some kind of deep wisdom, some musing on redemption and atonement, some reminder that he has been punishing himself for his sins long before the two of them even met. But he is also certain that Caleb has heard it all before; that perhaps hearing it another time might push him over the edge to believing it, but more likely that he will only accept it when he feels he is ready to.

Essek wonders if that day will ever come. In the meantime, he will show Caleb the care that Caleb has always offered him.

“Come to bed,” Essek says, as softly as he knows how, and offers his hand to Caleb, who stares at it for a long moment.

“I cannot imagine you’re tired.”

“You are.” When Caleb lets him wrap their hands together, he pulls him to his feet and begins to toe off his still muddy shoes. “You sleep better with someone around.”

Caleb doesn’t ask how he has noticed that, only sheds his coat and his shoes and climbs beneath the covers, scrunching his face into a pillow. He is already half-asleep by the time Essek joins him, taking the time to first set his things on the vacant chair and set an alarm around the room just in case.

He doesn’t anticipate any trouble, but he knows Caleb will rest easier with that in place.

Essek really is not tired, that much was true, but he still lets Caleb grip his hand tightly between his own and settles into the bed beside him after extinguishing the lamp on the table. In the dark, as Caleb’s breathing settles into a calm rhythm for the first time since this afternoon, Essek can count every freckle on his face.

— 

Watch with Fjord is a quieter affair, but it is always the calmest waking hours he spends with the Nein, even more so than Caduceus’ offers of tea and pleasantries. There is no pretense about the time he spends opposite Fjord, and he thinks they are more alike than either of them care to admit. 

Looking in a broken mirror is only so pleasant.

But when the night is dark and the sky littered with stars, and the quiet hangs between them, their similarities are easier to bear. 

“Is it…” Essek’s voice breaks with his question; doubt has made him rethink questions before they’re asked out loud. Fjord peers at him in the dark, their eyes gold and silver in the dim light the dome affords them. “When did you believe me someone worthy of trust?”

Fjord muses over the question for a moment, like wine on his tongue, then replies, “Who says I trust you?”

Essek can taste a joke when he hears one, waits for the response he knows is coming.

“I don’t know,” Fjord answers slowly. “I don’t really believe in trusting someone. I believe in waiting to see if they do right by you.”

“And if they don’t?” The question goes unspoken, but they both know it. _And when I didn’t?_

“Well, you ask them if they’re going to make it right. And then you wait to see if they do. And then you wait some more until they wrong you again.”

Essek feels queasy as he imagines the thought of wronging his friends as badly as he had already wronged them before he had even met them. He thinks that the implicit suggestion is that mistakes are made everyday, but Essek can’t say when mistakes turn into wrongs, when wrongs turn into sins. Certainly some sins are too great to be forgiveness.

Forgiveness is subjective, though. His queen would have him killed for his sins, if she knew what he had done, and when the Mighty Nein discovered them they welcomed him into their family.

For something by which people live and die, sin and forgiveness are certainly fraught subjects. It’s no wonder he gave so little care to either, when every decision he made was so black and white. 

Shadow does not live in the darkness. It only exists in the light.

“That sounds like it takes a great deal of faith,” Essek says finally, a heavy smile on his face. He can’t quite bring himself to meet Fjord’s eyes. “If that is the case then how can you justify killing, when you could de-escalate instead?”

“Well, I certainly try, when I’m able, but I will also defend my friends—and myself, when necessary. And in our line of work…” he gestures around them, to the open field in which they’ve made camp, the dome that never feels like true protection, even though inherently he knows it is. “It’s often necessary.”

Essek peers down to his hands, juxtaposes the darkness he can create with the light that has been offered to him. “I do not know if I can trust myself to know the difference.”

“Are you worried about murder?” Fjord asks slowly. 

“I am worried…” Essek’s fingers ball into fists, collecting all of the tension in his body as he squeezes his eyes shut, then relaxes, more slouched than he was before, elbows resting on his knees. “I am worried that there is already too much blood on my hands. That I only wash them in more blood.” Finally he looks to Fjord, who watches him in the light, shadow cast over half of his face. “Faith—belief—does not come easy to me.”

“Nor to me,” Fjord offers. Though it does not answer his questions, it brings him comfort to know that he is not alone in asking them.

But when Fjord shifts, the lines in his face are pronounced, and Essek cannot help but wonder what he will do when he is alone with them again. 

—

“ _You fucking idiot!_ ”

The voice comes back to him with consciousness as he blinks away the light in his eyes, the sun overhead as blinding as it was the moment he left Rosohna, and for a second panic swells in his chest—that his goddess has left him, that he is no longer as welcome in the light. No, no, I tried—

“ _Are you trying to get yourself killed?_ ”

The torrential rage mars Caleb’s unshaven face as Essek blinks away the sunspots, and the light settles into a pleasant glow behind his eyes. He closes them again, letting his head fall to the parched ground. 

“I thought—“

“You thought reasoning with a scourger was going to get you anywhere?” He has never felt such anger from Caleb, not in the belly of a boat, not drunkenly in a tavern booth. Beau’s sharp, acute anger he is familiar with, Yasha's slow, roiling rage, Fjord’s righteous fury. Caleb’s anger is often masked by his own loathing, and Essek imagines he knows why—for all of his personal hatred, Caleb has never offered his own body willingly as sacrifice.

Essek cannot bring himself to explain. If he does not offer all of what he has to give in service of atonement, then he will forever be indebted to this goddess who has rescued him.

The debt he has amassed—to Sarenrae, to the Mighty Nein—would take lifetimes to repay, and he has foregone his opportunity for that. 

Soft hands coax his shoulders until he sits up, and he finds himself leaning heavily on Jester, the wounds that pierced his abdomen still throbbing with enough pain that he nearly passes out again. “Don’t you dare do that again,” she scolds, even as she pushes her own healing magic into him. Deliriously, he thinks she doesn’t understand—her god owes her far more than she has ever owed him.

By the time he opens his eyes again, Caleb has stalked off, several spots on his coat still smoldering, and Jester props him against her pack as she moves to tend to the others. 

The rest of them give him a wide berth, their glances catching on his flushed cheeks, until Caduceus crouches beside him and offers a hand, and another heap of healing. “Don’t make yourself a martyr.” His voice is a low rumble, and even he seems… well, it’s hard to call the firbolg angry even in the worst of circumstances, but certainly irritated. “No one’s asked that of you.”

Maybe it’s that he has always struggled to understand Caduceus’ point of view; maybe it’s that this has touched on too tight of a string. Maybe it’s simply the last straw. Essek shoves himself upright, the pain and the blood loss threatening to black him out in the process. “No one has asked anything of me! If this…” he gestures to the charred corpse of their opponent, burned beyond recognition, and certainly beyond interrogating her for information, “is what I am asked to do here, then perhaps I want none of it! Perhaps that woman—“

“That woman would’ve—tried to—kill you without a second thought,” Caleb snarled, as he kicks the sword that fell from her hand when he had sent a burst of flame through her body. “Any one of us. There are people who cannot be made to see reason, Essek!”

“And I was one of them once!”

“Obviously not,” Beau shrugs, and every place where the open air hits ripped flesh pulses with pain and fury in his body.

When they are dead and gone, when they are fertilizing this cold earth, he will still be left to pick up the pieces of what they have wrought—what he has wrought with them. It is not a path he trusts himself to walk alone.

But he can’t bring himself to say that out loud, and so he seethes as they watch him where he lays.

Caleb glares at him for one last moment before he sinks to the ground and opens his spell book to weave the dome around them, and doesn’t look at him again before he sleeps.

—

It is the first time he leaves them in a long time, the image of a light guiding him, and it cannot be anything to fear because light is the only thing he knows how to follow.

He teleports after it with a vague destination in mind, and finds himself in front of a temple older than his civilization.

Still, it rises from the ground with a glow beyond the doors, and the outline of a small individual inside, walking among the light. 

When he enters, the person turns—a small, white-haired gnome, who smiles at him the moment she lays eyes on him. 

“Ah,” she says softly, and her voice is reminiscent of the goddess he spoke to so many months ago. For a moment he wonders if he is speaking to Sarenrae here, in this temple—that either the Divine Gate has been broken without his knowledge or he has surpassed the usual limits of his spellwork to bring himself to another plane, but he knows that isn’t true. “You must be who I was drawn here to see.”

He can barely speak as he follows after her in the half-light of the temple. She gestures him to sit on the edge of the alter, where she settles, and he thinks that she certainly looks like someone who can guide him. Ethereal, as though she has been blessed by Sarenrae herself. She exists in stark contrast to him: bloodied, beaten, shirt still ripped from where the blade cut across his stomach only hours earlier.

It is all he can do not to collapse at her feet, and wish for rest.

“Sarenrae told me another follower would be in Vasselheim that would need my assistance,” she says, and holds out a hand. He hesitates for a moment before he rests his hand in hers. 

“I hope I have not caused you trouble in getting here.”

“No, no, I have a very powerful friend who gave me a lift,” she smiles, and he almost laughs, a bit deliriously.

“Funny. Once upon a time, I was the very powerful friend who gave my friends lifts places,” he says, and her smile widens.

“What do you need?”

“I have done… terrible things,” he says, the words choking him like thorns, and her gaze doesn’t soften. “And even still, I want to do better. I want to be better. It doesn’t feel like I have time to account for every terrible thing I wish to atone for. How can I fight others when those I am at odds with might be the same? I don’t know how to trust my own judgment of others’ ill intent.”

“Oh,” she says, pursing her lips. “I see.” She takes both of his hands now, though her own are smaller than his. “Do you fight with these friends you mentioned?” 

He nods quickly. “Yes.”

“And do you trust them?”

The image of a party, where they never tried to harm him, the hull of a ship, where they offered him atonement, swims to his vision. “With my life.”

“Then perhaps you need to start by trusting them to know when those you are fighting might be saved.”

He trusts Caleb, trusts his judgment, but he also thinks of a closed fist in a dark jail cell, and he wonders whether Caleb’s judgment may lapse in this area.

“I don’t know that I can do that now.”

“Have you seen how they treat those they care about who have hurt them?” the gnome asks, and he realizes suddenly that he has not asked her name, only followed a nameless follower of his patron into a temple and asked her advice. It is one of the most rash decisions he has ever made—even trading the beacons away only came after careful deliberation.

Still, it is easier to bare his soul to a stranger.

He has to think to process her question, and he bows his head. “Yes. I was one of them.”

Her small hand rests on his shoulder. “Then you should know how good their judgment is.”

“And perhaps they chose wrongly with me?”

The woman’s smile turns to amusement. Yes, he certainly can see the Everlight in her. “You are here, asking for aid in determining how to help. I don’t think they chose wrong—and I don’t think Sarenrae did either, when she made you one of her clerics.”

“It feels like a betrayal of what I have been working toward to kill so readily. They want to charge into battle with that intent, and I… I don’t know how to do that, anymore. Perhaps I am still a coward.”

“My family bore the name Trickfoot for generations,” she says, bringing his eyes to look up toward the light of the temple, and he thinks that nothing is so beautiful or blinding outside of the Island of Renewal. “I still carry it, a reminder of where I came from. Atonement doesn’t mean becoming something else. It means becoming something more.”

She sits with him as the night passes, listening to him tell the stories of his shame and his friends and how he has come to this place, to the Everlight, and it is the first time since the ship that allowing himself to be seen by another person does not feel like awaiting judgment.

And even then, he was awaiting it—it simply didn’t come. Here, it feels as though he surrenders all of himself to the waiting arms of the goddess, and he talks until his throat is hoarse and then some. 

When he expresses his fear of outliving those who have given him the chance to atone, her face is stricken for the first time, and he wonders what loss she has seen, who she has outlived—she does not volunteer the information, though, and she rests a hand on his.

“I am afraid that death always leaves things unfinished,” she says softly. “The only thing to do is go on.”

“They are the only guidance I have here.” He presses the hand that she isn’t holding to his face and is surprised to find tears there; he hadn’t realized he was still crying. “I can’t… I can’t go home.”

Home. It’s not a word he has associated with the Dynasty in sometime, but he only thinks of pieces of it—his towers, likely abandoned, if not passed to someone else in his family; the house with the glowing trees on its rough, similarly empty. The barren terrain of Bazzoxan, where his father’s body has never been retrieved, where his brother still resides. Only empty graves of lives he has shed.

“Home is not a place, it’s the people waiting for you,” she smiles. “Who is waiting for you?”

He thinks again of his brother, but he barely dares to hope that that might be a path that he has not closed and locked himself—barely dares to hope he might have a key to that place after all.

Pike Trickfoot does not waver, only listens to him and sometimes asks questions that bring him some kind of further illumination. “Are you afraid that if these people you have made deals with are beyond redemption, then maybe you are too?”

He freezes, as though the blood in his veins has turned to ice. “Perhaps.”

She shakes her head. “That isn’t how redemption works.” The words drag him forcibly back to his first meeting with the Everlight, and she wraps his arms around his shoulders as he weeps for the reminder.

By the time the night has passed, he feels light enough to float, and he does, as he gets to his feet—and for the first time ever, it is not something he does with any pretention. It is something he does without use for weight.

Pike watches him with amusement. “That doesn’t seem like a trick you learned from Sarenrae.”

“No, no,” he smiles, the grin on his face involuntary, “this is something I taught myself.”

“You seem very clever,” she says. “I hope you’ll learn to trust yourself.”

The smile falters for a moment. “Intellect and wisdom… they are not exactly the same.”

“No, that’s true,” she admits, as she stands to guide him into the morning light. “But I think you can learn both if you try hard enough. And I think you are doing well with trying.”

“Thank you,” he says, and bows his head. “I hope we can meet again, one day.”

“I think we will, Essek Thelyss,” she says, and he has said so much tonight that he wonders if he ever told her his name, or if she simply knew somehow. “Perhaps after you reunite with your friends.”

He shivers as they step into the cool air of the morning, and her words hit him. His friends are without him, after a hard fight and a harder recovery, and he settles onto the ground. “Yes. I must go.”

She smiles. “I believe you do,” she says, and he teleports away.

—

The sun hasn’t risen when his feet kiss the earth outside of the dome, and he sinks to the ground, shivering in the damp dew of the early dawn. The dome does nothing to keep sound in, so in the silence of the darkness he can hear them breathing and, in Yasha and Caduceus’s case, snoring heavily.

The chill in the air is enough to make him wish for the warmth of the dome, but even minutes feel like a lifetime when he is half a world away from Vasselheim again, where time barely seems to exist. He resigns himself to wait, until a soft voice calls over the sounds of sleep—

“Essek?”

Jester shuffles out of the dome and sits crosslegged across from him. She eyes the places where wounds have healed beneath his shirt, where his eyes are lined with exhaustion. 

“Where have you been?”

He rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hands, curling into himself, and though the wounds are gone, the phantom pain of them is not. Healing has never erased the fact that the wounds have been there, and he thinks he has spent so much time trying to undo harm that perhaps he never recognized that getting rid of the scars does not means they aren’t there.

His body feels like a constellation of mended cracks, held together with fear and magic and love, love that might shatter him altogether the way Jester looks at him. She was the first to believe in him, and of course she is here now. 

Sometimes it feels as though the Mighty Nein are holding him together with sheer force of will, and that is the problem, isn’t it? Because his will has never been as strong as theirs.

“Vasselheim,” he says finally, smoothing his hair back from his face and sniffling against the memory of the tears he has shed tonight. “I spoke to a cleric of Sarenrae.”

“That’s good,” Jester says, and it always astounds him how much heavier her voice is when it is quiet. “Did you find what you’re looking for?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I found… well, reassurance, I suppose. Which is beneficial, but… it isn’t quite what I’m looking for.”

“That’s disappointing.”

“No, no…” he thinks to how light he felt leaving the temple, and shakes his head. “It was very good, actually. I think I may be looking for something that no one else can give me.”

Jester nods. “You have to find it in yourself.”

“Perhaps.” She pulls dew off of the blades of grass in front of her, and he slouches into himself, head bowed. “I am… sorry. I’m sorry to have put you all in danger yesterday.”

“We’re not worried about you putting us in danger,” she says evenly, but neither of them look up. “We can take care of ourselves. It’s you we’re worried about.”

“I can take care of myself just as well as you can, Jester.”

She leans forward and holds his chin up with dew-covered fingers. “But will you? When something is attacking you? When we’re not around?”

Yes, he will shatter again, when Jester asks him how he will live with her death. The sob racks his body, but there are no tears left, so he leans into her shoulder, gasping for breath. 

“I have no one but you,” he breathes, and she wraps her arms around his trembling shoulders.

“You have you,” she reminds him. “But you have to believe you get to count yourself.”

That used to be easy, counting himself among his own assets—easy, of course, when he was all he had. Now that he has surrendered to the idea that other people might care about him, not simply for what he can do, it is hard to acknowledge, even harder to accept.

“You don’t have to believe it now,” Jester says with a hint of a smile, the smallest light to match the first tinge of sun in the eastern sky. “For now you just have to believe you can live with yourself. Okay? Maybe that’s all she asks of you.” She wipes his eyes with her thumbs and gives him a kiss on the forehead. “Most gods only need belief as the thing that sustains them—and if Sarenrae is the goddess of redemption, then I think living with yourself is all the devotion she needs.”

He pulls away from her grip and nods, and the way the sun rises reminds him of his vision of the Island of Renewal, the promise of a new day. That’s all his friends have been offering him since they met, really—another sunrise.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Let me know what you think!


End file.
